November 1, 1998

DNA Tests Offer Evidence That Jefferson Fathered a Child With His Slave

By DINITIA SMITH and NICHOLAS WADE

NA tests performed on the descendants of Thomas Jefferson's
family and of Jefferson's young slave, Sally Hemings, offer
compelling new evidence that the third president of the United
States fathered at least one of her children as has long been
speculated, according to an article in the next issue of the
scientific journal Nature.

The report is based on blood samples collected by Eugene A.
Foster, a retired pathologist who lives in Charlottesville, Va. The
finding undercuts the position of historians who have long said
that Jefferson did not have a liaison with the slave some 28 years
his junior and confirms, but with a surprising twist, the oral
tradition that has been handed down among Sally Hemings'
descendants.

The new evidence is likely to send historians scurrying to
re-evaluate Jefferson, particularly his role in the anti-slavery
movement. It may also have a wider resonance. The accusation of an
affair with Hemings, one of several charges considered in a mock
impeachment trial staged by the Massachusetts state Legislature in
1805, was indirectly denied by Jefferson.

"Now, with impeccable timing," the historian Joseph Ellis and
the geneticist Eric Lander write in a joint commentary on the new
report, "Jefferson reappears to remind us of a truth that should
be self-evident. Our heroes -- and especially presidents -- are not
gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans."

Foster's finding rests on analysis of the Y chromosome, an
unusual genetic component because, except at its very tips, it
escapes the shuffling of the genetic material that occurs between
every generation. The only changes on the Y chromosome are rare
sporadic mutations in the DNA that accumulate slowly over
centuries. Male lineages can therefore be distinguished from one
another through the characteristic set of mutations carried in
their Y chromosomes.

Foster said he began his research almost on a whim, at a
friend's suggestion. He soon grew more serious, and with the help
of many colleagues, has tracked down four male lineages that bear
on the paternity of Sally Hemings' children. They are Jefferson's
lineage, derived from his paternal grandfather; the lineages of Tom
Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings' oldest and
youngest sons; and the lineage of the Carrs, two of Jefferson's
nephews on his sister's side.

Sally Hemings had other children, but they left no surviving
male heirs. The Carrs come into the picture because of the story
spread by Jefferson's heirs that one or the other of the nephews
fathered Hemings' children, explaining their pronounced resemblance
to the Jeffersons.

Foster's samples were analyzed by Christopher Tyler-Smith, a
population geneticist at the University of Oxford in England, and
his colleagues. They found that the Jeffersonian Y chromosome had a
distinctive set of mutations, unmatched in any of 1,200, mostly
European, men who were analyzed by the same method.

The set of mutations on the Y chromosomes of three descendants
of John Carr were almost identical to one another and different
from the Jeffersonian chromosome, ruling out the Carrs as possible
fathers.

The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson made
a perfect match to Jefferson's, but those of five descendants of
Thomas Woodson were completely different.

"The simplest and most probable explanations" for the
findings, Foster and colleagues report, "are that Thomas
Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was the father of
Eston Hemings Jefferson, and that Thomas Woodson was not Thomas
Jefferson's son."

Lander, a DNA expert at the Whitehead Institute in Boston, said
Foster's evidence showed there was a less than 1 percent chance
that a person chosen at random would share the same set of Y
chromosome mutations that exist in the Jefferson lineage.

"The fact that Eston Hemings' descendant has this rare
chromosome, together with the historical evidence, seals the case
that Jefferson fathered Eston," Lander said.

The evidence that Thomas Woodson was not Jefferson's son is
surprising, Foster said, because of the particularly strong oral
tradition that has come down independently in the five lines of the
Woodson family. Woodson, born shortly after Jefferson's return from
his service as minister in Paris, was 12 when James Callender, a
journalist, published accusations in a Richmond newspaper that
Jefferson was Hemings' lover. Shortly afterward, Woodson was sent
off to live with a relative.

One of the blood samples in the study was taken from John
Jefferson, 52, of Norrisville, Pa., who is believed to be a direct
descendant of Hemings through Eston Hemings Jefferson. John
Jefferson's Y chromosome matched blood samples taken from the
lineal descendants of Jefferson's uncle, Field Jefferson.

In a telephone interview, Jefferson said he was not particularly
surprised at the news that he was descended from a president and
his slave. "I've known it practically all my life," said
Jefferson, who is disabled and does not work. "I guess I was happy
about it, but not really surprised since I've believed it all
along."

Jefferson's sister, Julia Jefferson Westerinen, 64, had a more
ebullient reaction. "Isn't that wild," said Ms. Westerinen, who
lives on Staten Island and sells furniture and office equipment to
architects and corporations.

"I've known for about 15 years, but I thought I was related to
Jefferson's nephew," she said.

Robert Gillespie, a lawyer in Richmond who is the head of the
Monticello Association, which includes the descendants of
Jefferson's two daughters, said, "We've always agreed with
mainstream historians that Jefferson wouldn't have fathered Sally
Hemings' children." But, Gillespie said, the DNA results are
"changing my attitude."

Gillespie said he had always believed that "Jefferson would
have shown the second set of children love and affection just as he
did the first set. Apparently he was a product of the 18th century,
and had a double standard."

Ellis, author of "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas
Jefferson," (Knopf, 1997), and other Jefferson scholars like Dumas
Malone have long said that Jefferson did not have a relationship
with Hemings. Ellis once dismissed the possibility as "a tin can
tied to Jefferson's reputation."

Now, he said, the DNA tests have changed his mind. "This
evidence is new evidence and it seems to me to be clinching," he
said. Ellis said circumstantial evidence, including a quotation
attributed to another of Hemings' sons, James Madison, also pointed
to a liaison. "It includes the timing of her pregnancies, the
physical resemblance of her children to Jefferson and Madison
saying late in life that his mother told him."

Well before Y chromosome testing entered the picture, a minority
of historians were asserting that Jefferson had the affair, notably
Fawn Brodie, in her book "Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History."
Another scholar, Annette Gordon-Reed, an associate professor of law
at New York Law School and author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally
Hemings: An American Controversy" (University Press of Virginia),
said she felt vindicated by the DNA tests. "If people had accepted
this story, he would never have become an icon," Professor
Gordon-Reed said. "All these historians did him a favor until we
could get past our primitive racism. I don't think he would have
been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of
America can't live 38 years with a black woman."

The new DNA evidence is likely to renew questions about
Jefferson's position on slavery, Lander and Ellis believe.
"Jefferson's stated reservations about ending slavery included a
fear that emancipation would lead to racial mixing and
amalgamation," they wrote in their commentary in Nature. "His own
interracial affair now personalizes this issue, while adding a
dimension of hypocrisy."

Sally Hemings, who was born in 1772 or 1773, was the
illegitimate half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha, the offspring
of a relationship between John Wayles and Elizabeth (Betty)
Hemings, a slave. Sally became Jefferson's property when he
inherited the Wayles estate in 1774, and arrived at Monticello as a
little girl in 1776. She was later described by one of Jefferson's
slaves, Isaac Jefferson, as "mighty near white . . . very
handsome, long straight hair down her back." Jefferson's grandson,
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, described her as "light colored and
decidedly good looking."

In her early childhood, Hemings probably acted as a "nurse" to
Jefferson's daughter, Mary, a custom in slave culture. Then in
1787, Jefferson, a widower, who was then the U.S. ambassador to
France, summoned his daughter Maria to live with him. Maria was
accompanied by her young attendant, Sally, who was then about 13.
Sally's son Madison, who was born in 1805, at the end of his life
said that his mother became Jefferson's "concubine" in Paris.

In 1789, Sally Hemings returned with the Jefferson family to
Virginia. By then, Sally was 16 or 17, and pregnant, according to
Madison Jefferson.

Her first child, Thomas, who the new studies say was not
genetically linked to Jefferson, was born soon after her return.

Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said later that
the boy looked like Thomas Jefferson. "At some distance or in the
dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might have been mistaken
for Mr. Jefferson," he said.

The evidence of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings will only
add to a re-evaluation of Jefferson that has been going on among
historians for some time, Ellis said. "The take on Jefferson for
30 years or so has become more and more critical," he said.
"Increasingly, he is a window in which race and slavery are the
panes."

Jefferson, as portrayed by Ellis and others, was an ambivalent
figure. "He plays hide and seek within himself," Ellis said.

But most Americans, he predicted, would have a kinder reaction
to what he called "the longest-running mini-series in American
history."

"Within the larger world," Ellis said, "the dominant response
will be Jefferson is more human, to regard this as evidence of his
frailties, frailties that seem more like us. The urge to regard him
as an American icon will overwhelm any desire to take him off his
pedestal."